Elder Scrolls Online - Release Date Announced

December 11th, 2013, 18:58

Zenimax Online has a new post on The Elder Scrolls Online webpage announcing the game will release on 4.4.2014 and for PS4 and Xbox One in June 2014. They even included a new video about how war works.

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Greetings everyone. As we are approaching the end of 2013 and heading into our launch year, I thought I’d take a moment to thank you, our community, for your continued support. I’d also like to give you an update on the game’s development and our launch plans for 2014.

First, thanks to everyone involved in the ESO community: those we met at trade shows, those of you on social media, and those that have had a chance to play the game and provided invaluable feedback through beta testing. I personally am humbled by the intense feelings of excitement expressed to us by the community at large. At shows like PAX East, PAX Prime, Gamescom, Eurogamer Expo, Paris Games Week, etc. – we always had three to four hour lines to play ESO. We know those wait times weren’t easy, and the great patience and enthusiastic reception you showed was remarkable. Everyone here at ZeniMax Online appreciates each and every one of you and your fantastic support of the game.

Game development is coming along very well. We completed major systems development, and are focusing on making this the Elder Scrolls game you expect: polishing the hundreds and hundreds of hours of content, making combat even more fun and responsive, fixing quest issues, and much, much more. In fact, we plan on spending the next few months before launch reacting to the latest feedback from internal and external testers and gameplay data we have collected.

As some of you know, we’ve been in beta testing for about a year now, leading up to our most recent test in late November where we had over 300,000 people in the game over a 48 hour period. We’ve had approximately 4 million people sign up for beta and that number continues to grow. We hope that just about every one of you who have signed up for beta will get an invitation to play sometime between now and the weeks before launch. These tests are very important, not only for gameplay feedback, but also to test our infrastructure. Beta tests can sometimes be a little rough when we are testing some systems for the first time with large numbers of players. So thank you to all who have participated for your understanding and support. It is very much appreciated.

Worldwide demand for The Elder Scrolls Online is extraordinarily high. This means we need to do a staggered rollout of the different versions of the game to spread out the initial service load and ensure an enjoyable, smooth gameplay experience. It is not only a game we are launching – it is a large online service as well, and our number one priority is to ensure a trouble-free, stable rollout for everyone.

We long ago promised that as soon as a version of the game is ready, we will launch it. So we’re happy to announce that the game will launch worldwide for PC and Mac players on Friday, April 4, 2014, while PlayStation 4 and Xbox One fans will see the game arriving on consoles in June 2014.

Again, thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm over the past year. We are very proud of this game and excited to share it with you. We can’t wait to see you in the game in 2014! —Matt

Was interested in this one until they announced being a subscription MMO, no thanks, already have LOTRO for this. Hope they don't stop to do the normal, SP, TES games. Will love to see a TES game showing Elseweyr (I know about the Skyrim mod)

Originally Posted by Thrasher
I wonder how they came to that conclusion? How about Elder Scrolls Single Player?

I'll guess that the 4 millions sign-up for beta is the basis for the conclusion. As a comparison SWTOR had 1.5 millions sign-up a few months before release and GW2 had about 1 millions. These all include "dupes" of course…

How many of those who showed interest will actually stay once this gets going? I can't imagine this will be much like the single player experience - I'd hate to have other playing stomping all over *my* Tamriel!

I can't imagine them stopping the single player games. Skyrim has sold something like 13million copies and if it got out that the single player games were ending, they'd probably lose a lot of MMO players at that time; assuming the MMO won't be a flop. Also, the MMO is a seperate studio, not Bethesda Softworks.

Skyrim was released to the super-cool dated of 11/11/11 and it was a pretty bad release with a lot of bugs. Looks like they're pinning themselves in the same corner again all in the name of another super-cool release date so this went from a near-insta-buy to a watch and wait.

-- If I'm right but there is no wife around to acknowledge it, am I still right?

I hope this game fails. I hope it fails HARD. The last thing we need is another generic, boring, grindy MMO. How dare they take the brilliant single player TES universe and make it into some knock-off MMO. Nothing in this trailer was interesting.

Consider the last line in the trailer: "an empty throne…calling you to reign." Wow, they must think we be morons. Another game where we are all told we are special, and yet we all see literally thousands of other players doing the same "chosen one" things in-game. This is why MMOs mostly stink. There is no immersion when you are just another cog in the grindy keep-paying-your-subscription gameplay model.

Did I mention I hate how they are milking Skyrim and using it to entice people into what will be ultimately a miserable generic MMO failure?

On the positive side…oh wait, there is nothing positive about this. Dang you Zenimax for selling your artistic integrity. And I have to believe the real creators of TES, who made Skyrim, are NOT PLEASED either by this abomination. That is all…for now.

They will never finish testing the game for a release on April at the speed they have been going…

They better hope they get most of the bugs ironed out by that release date. As much as people hate bugs in single player games, in an MMO it leads to hemorrhaging subs after then initial month is up. Most of these MMOs play too similar, so people will not stick around long if the gameplay is not up to snuff, regardless of the name recognition of the series. (Case in point, Final Fantasy XIV 1.0)

It's a pile. Standard mmorpg with an Elderscrolls skin. If you have never played a mmo perhaps you'll find something there. But nothing sets it apart and it feels poorly implemented. Some hail it the next DAoC for the pvp content. Meh. I hope this doesn't hurt the franchise too much.

It's possible it'll succeed. Many TES gamers started recently with Skyrim on consoles, and might never have played an MMO before, so for them the experience would be new. The MMO experience is great and addictive… the first or second time you play one, but I would bet most PC players have already played at least 1 MMO (WoW in most cases).

This is what seems like has happened in the development of this game, from my point of view. This game has devs from DAoC who really wanted to make DAoC 2. EA would not allow them to do that(for probably the same reasons they would not allow a UO2) so they went to Zenimax with the idea that they could secretly shoehorn DAoC 2 into an Elder Scrolls Online game(but doing that as secretly as possible without alerting the Zenimax suits of their true intentions of wanting a game as close to DAoC 2 as possible). It seems they have put as much DAoC elements into the game as Zenimax would let them get away with. That is why there is so much focus on pvp and three warring factions, just like DAoC had. I wish no devs from DAoC were working on this and a different dev team who was truly interested in making a pure elder scrolls game had been able to make it. I don't mind pvp if its completely avoidable and does not affect the gameplay of people who have no interest in pvp, but when the focus of the game revolves around pvp, I tend to lose interest very quickly, even if pvp is optional. Myself, I prefer co-op play with other players, not stabbing other players in the back and getting a kick and a laugh out of it. On a side note, I did play and enjoy DAoC very much, but ONLY after I found out they had added a purely pve co-op server named Gaheris that was completely untainted by pvp. No such server will exist in this Elder Scrolls Online game.

You sell millions of copies of a singleplayer endless mobrespawns game. Of course your next step is current multiplayer RPG design, fans of that genre are not idiots like me who can't stand grinding.

Originally Posted by Brumbek
I hope this game fails. I hope it fails HARD. The last thing we need is another generic, boring, grindy MMO. How dare they take the brilliant single player TES universe and make it into some knock-off MMO.

It seems like this could be a fun game with the exploring. I seem to be one of the few posters that enjoy both single player and MMO games. Will give it a try on day one and it will be a huge success at first. The question will be if they keep those players.

DDO, LOTRO, and WOW have all been out for over 5 years so there is room for sub based games. A lot of players would rather pay a sub then stupid pay to win games that are released now. Plus, with a sub based game maybe they can keep some 11 year olds out.